There is always Loops
You get to watch a couple of videos only without logging in. No search.
Yikes.
No one uses loops. That Dan dude went all in on such a silly thing. Won’t be surprised if itit dies in two years or becomes a zombie project.
Sadly no way to host your own instance yet, but it does look promising.
IIRC that’s old news and you can now self host and there are other instances up.
The git repo has a server installation guide.
Here’s an idea. How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely, and stop rewarding them with excessive device permissions and personal data.
How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely
In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.
The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!
Yeah, let’s not do any of that shit either.
Literally anything but FOSS, huh?
Out of the frying pan and into a cold frying pan.
FOSS is just too much of a hassle for most people, unfortunately.
It unironically is, and it’s not entirely the fault of the users either. The average person doesn’t know what FOSS means, what instances are, or what a federated service is and many platforms do a poor job of explaining what those things are and why they are superior.
Additionally, people need to understand that FOSS is not a selling point to the average user and that throwing that term around will go in one ear and out the other. As far as they are concerned their apps are already free because they don’t have to pay a transactional monetary value for them and “open source” is beyond meaningless to them and they couldn’t care less.
There’s a FOSS tiktok equivalent?
Loops is the FOSS fediverse equivalent.
Oh come on. Another centralised social media service that could be compromised. Wtf is wrong with these people
They follow what is advertised. Fediverse, by its nature, doesn’t have money for this. There was a push for Mastodon, though.
When you say there was a push, do you mean there was a time when they did have ads, or do you mean the community push with the twitter troubles?
The community push, mainly. But there seemed to be a PR campaign to capitalize on it. I don’t know if there were official adverts.
Ah okay, that was my understanding as well. I was curious if anyone had tried making an ad.
99% don’t know what the Fediverse is. I can’t blame them for jumping ship to Upscrolled since it’s what they have heard of.
And me, living in the dark woods of Lemmy and Mastodon, have never, until now, heard of this ‘upscrolled’. I really like my ignorance-laced way of life.
I don’t really fault them when they don’t know there is an alternative. And the alternative isn’t clear cut and/or very good.
I do fault them for when they think that the platform is the solution and don’t expect the same thing to happen.
Is there a federated/decentralized version of tiktok? Right now would be the perfect time to implement one of these.
Loops.
However, of a dozen instances that exist, only the main one - loops.video - functions well and serves a diversity of content. It’s still in heavy development, but technically, ActivityPub is already included.
Account created
Suspended instantly
So much for open web heh
You probably used a VPN or privacy browser. Social media platforms are terrified of bots and will punish a poor Recaptcha V3 or similar score without telling you.
VPN + adblocker + resist fingerprinting + mail alias (Addy) indeed
They have cloudflare captcha which I passed, so they’re being annoying
Update: unbanned after contacting their support by mail. No questions asked
It could be the mail alias. Most platforms have rules against disposable email addresses.
Probably
Got unbanned by their support, nice.
I think it’s hard to host a video-focused social media on the fediverse, I imagine it would have a high cost to maintain.
Build it on top of Bittorrent. If you like a post, you’re seeding it. When you want to stop seeding it, your like goes away.
Then popular things will have a large pool of seeds mitigating much of the bandwidth cost to the instance host.
With the side effect of making manipulating the voting algorithm with bots a lot more expensive.
I think people would be pretty quickly upset by the batter and storage drain from this. I have to imagine if picking an instance is a barrier to mastodon, most folks are not interested enough to learn the mechanics of why likes suddenly use system resources, and see it as a failing of the app.
I don’t see any other choices other than:
- You host it yourself. (Peer to Peer social media)
- You pay someone else to host it for you. (Instanced social media)
- You trade your digital freedom, privacy and political stability of your country to someone else to host it for you. (Meta, X, TikTok)
3 hasn’t been working out so far and people really don’t want to have to pay another subscription. So you can spend your battery life and data instead. Maybe setup the service so that other people can seed on your behalf, so you could use your own resources or pay for someone elses all in the same ecosystem.
Peertube does a similar thing, using bittorrent to share the load, but it only works while you’re actively watching the video so outside of very popular videos it is usually just the instance who is providing bandwidth. By tying the data sharing directly into the primary interaction method it creates a much larger pool of peers and, eventually, once everyone stops seeding it the data stops existing.
No permanent record of everything you’ve ever posted, no central repository of data to be hoovered up by the AI startup who pays off the instance owner, no empowering a single person to control all of social media for their own selfish ends.
Plus the network usage for people with data caps, ISPs who throttle you for any p2p traffic etc it’d be a mess. Not to mention torrents usually have a ‘ramp up’ time as they find and connect to peers, probably not what people used to and endless stream of autoplaying short-form videos would want.
Also PeerTube
oh damn, I didn’t notice it is open source at first
They’re leaving like redditors to Lemmy. There’s dozens of them!
It’s more like Twitter to BlueSky, which was a pinch more.
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OK, but currently it’s at least in the (relatively) good phase of the cycle
I tried it for an hour or so and it’s absolutely filled with Nazis. One of them was criticizing Elon Musk and Trump for not being nazi enough. No thanks.
I looked it up in the App store out of curiosity and holy crap that app almost as bad as TikTok for privacy. Though I suppose people jumping ship from TikTok aren’t too concerned about data privacy or else they wouldn’t have been using TikTok in the first place.
Fucking, lol. It’s not even close. How did you find that conclusion?
Tiktok shares a ton with third parties and needs a lot more permissions.
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Why would anyone use TikTok or any clone like that to begin with? Do they want their brain to rot?
Anything to get that dopamine drip from the Black Rectangle
See, White Rectangle, you swipe like this: “oh. oh quite. oh dear. oh no. aw. and how.”
But with Black Rectangle, you swipe like: “yo, hol’ da commentz, Imma bounce your pinky up in this!”this comment was brought to you by the nineties.
You say on another dopamine drop website
Oh i know
I’m more blaming the system than the user. The system is designed to be as addicting as possible. Literally a century of addiction research into drugs and gambling, all used to squeeze every drop of engagement from the user
To a point. At least we’re reading and using our brains more on these text-based sites!
Not federated. Nothing stops this app from getting worse in the future, right?
I trust my palestinian brother who created it
If they’re brown, they can’t let you down.
Well, Kanye never fails to entertain…
How many quick short videos can one consume before they become tired of them? What is the bizarre appeal to that crap instead of actually doing something?
Yes I am typing here on Lemmy, you could make an argument, but damn you see ten short videos you have seen them all.
For me it’s news snippets, recipe ideas, 3d print ideas, and short form comedy. I look at it maybe 15min daily. Sometimes days without. My wife probably does 2hrs a day (stay home mother, homeschool teacher, honored caregiver). For her it’s the entertainment that can be quickly put down, little investment involved.
I can’t imagine. I can get all of that elsewhere, video is such a slow delivery…
There is something just wrong with quick cuts and fast in your face stuff. I swear it’s a simple dumbing down plus dopamine injection. It can’t be good for you.
Best app yet, but eventually that app is gonna get bought out just like TikTok and eventually it will get censored.
don’t think the Palestinian owner will be keen on selling his social media to those who killed his family
Is this like UpDog?
What’s UpDog?
not much, how 'bout you?
This made me lol
41k new users in 4 days? Not too bad, but certainly not a mass exodus. Tiktok’s user base is quite large, although I don’t know the US specific user base size. It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.
Tiktok’s user base is quite large
875 million to over 950 million daily active users (DAU) globally as of Jan 2026.
It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.
TikTok was the better alternative. That’s half the joke. As soon as it caught on, the plutocrats stepped in and seized control
Not unlike how Facebook bought out and gutted Instagram or JP Morgan took over Reddit and cleaned out all the lefties before taking it public.
That’s before you get into the marketing budget that social media needs to build the kind of massive userbase you’re asking for.
Its website says the platform will remain “impartial” to political agendas, won’t shadowban users or content, and will “uphold social responsibility.”
I don’t feel, in this day and age, like you can be politically impartial (i.e. allow fascists to use your platform to spread propaganda) while simultaneously upholding social responsibility (i.e. not allow fascists to use your platform to spread propaganda).
You can be arguably impartial. Youre not banning them for being Nazis you’re banning them for all the stuff Nazis do like the racism. I would also argue you shouldn’t be politically impartial and just ban Nazis because Nazis should not feel welcomed.
If you look into the founder, you’ll quickly realize that he’s very much biased and has a lot of agendas to push, and I have no doubt in mind that this is reflected in his platform.
An Australian app, so you can say “Epstein” on this one but still not “stop the genocide and colonisation of Palestine”. At least the hate speech manager (for now) isn’t an ex-IDF Zionist and the platform (for now) is not expressly pro-Israel / pro-genocide.
Isn’t upscrolled created by a Palestinian? I doubt he’d be okay with censoring a genocide against his people.
